An Exceptional Mammoth

https://youtu.be/glFVEQJr_q8

Upcoming exhibit at The Prehistoric Museum

The REAL Jurassic Park

Upcoming Exhibit

Exhibit revision and creation seems to never stop at The Prehistoric Museum. Currently, the staff is working on two exhibits simultaneously. One of them is, "The Archaic: From Mammoths to Maize".

The Museum Director, Dr. Ken Carpenter is tediously creating miniature figures for the exhibit.

The Director of Education and Exhibits, Lloyd Logan is busy with a plethora of items including the design of the exhibit and creation of some components.

Dr. Tim Riley has been busy with pulling artifacts and all three have been collaborating on text and informational content. Keep a look out for news considering this new exhibit as well as the other ones in the works.

Whether you visited last month, or last year, there is always something new to discover!

Geology at the Prehistoric Museum

http://youtu.be/dkllFYzwcOQ

News Release

The Prehistoric Museum, USU Eastern

Got An Hour Or So?
Visit The Prehistoric Museum
Archaeology, Paleontology and Geology
We Have It All!

At The Prehistoric Museum you can see:
•One of the largest mounted ankylosaurs in the world
•The only Animantarx that has ever been found
•The Pilling Figurines, some of the best Fremont clay figurines
•The Huntington Mammoth, one of the most complete known
•A delightful kids play area
•An art gallery , and so much more!

155 East Main Street-Price, Utah
800-817-9949
usueastern.edu/museum

Animantarx Above

Peloroplites Above


Pilling Figurines Below

New Exhibit Coming Soon

Lloyd Logan, The Prehistoric Museum's Director of Education and Exhibits, working on a new exhibit soon to be unveiled.

School Groups Love THe Prehistoric Museum

School Tours

• School Groups are FREE (general admission fees are not required).
• Contact Lloyd Logan at least 2 weeks in advance at lloyd.logan@usu.edu or (435) 613-5760
• Tours are great for school groups and are targeted to K-12 grade levels with an emphasis on elementary education.

Contact us about your school tour today to secure your date. The kids will be glad that you did!

Tour Bus Information

Visit our Prehistoric World!

Paleontology, Archaeology, and Geology, we’ve got it all.

Visit one of five accredited museums in the state of Utah and the only accredited museum east of the Wasatch Front. The Prehistoric Museum is also a state and federal repository for prehistoric materials.

Explore informative and entertaining interpretative exhibits, some of which include hands-on and bilingual elements, about local archaeology, paleontology, and geology. Cell phone tours enhance the visitor experience with additional information.

The Hall of Archaeology contains the world-renowned Pilling Figurines, some of the most complete and ornate Fremont figurines in existence. Visitors can also see the Huntington Mammoth that has been hailed as one of the most pristine Columbian mammoth examples to-date, a Fremont pithouse, and a Ute tipi that visitors can enter.

The Hall of Paleontology is host to a veritable parade of real bone and cast skeletal mounts; the museum offers unique and original finds such as Utahraptor, Animantarx, Gastonia burgei, Allosaurus, Chasmosaurus, Stegosaurus and much more. The collection also contains many dinosaur tracks removed from local coal mines, dinosaur eggs, and other fossils.

You will see a spectacular geology area in the Hall of Paleontology that adds another interesting and informative aspect to the museum. Where else can you touch a meteorite fragment older than the earth? (4.65 billion years old)

The museum has an Observation Lab, where visitors can see the processes of curation and fossil preparation as well as speak with a preparator one-on-one.

Children love the Discovery Area. It is a place to unearth dinosaur bones, color, play with puppets, put together puzzles, or play in a pithouse replica complete with a corn grinding station.

The museum also offers an art gallery with different exhibitions throughout the year.

The Prehistoric Museum is open year-round Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. closed Sundays. See the website, usueastern.edu/museum for more information.

Special Tour Bus Rates

$2.00 per person, that’s a savings of 67%

Guided tours available upon request. Must be booked at least two weeks in advance and are subject to tour guide availability.

Contact Lloyd Logan, Director of Education and Exhibits, today to book your tour now. Booking in advance assures your date and time will be available.

lloyd.logan@usu.edu

(435) 613-5760

N E W S R E L E A S E

N E W S   R E L E A S E

Jan. 28, 2016

Contact: Dr. Kenneth Carpenter, (435) 613-5752; ken.carpenter@usu.edu

Writer: John DeVilbiss, (435) 797-1358; john.devilbiss@usu.edu

New Dinosaur Named (Future “Jurassic World” Film Star?)

PRICE, Utah – Paleontologists from Utah and Connecticut have discovered a new dinosaur that’s been right under scientists’ noses for the past 102 years. Meet Alcovasaurus longispinus, the dinosaur formerly known as Stegosaurus longispinus.

Over the past century, no one questioned the original species label given to the great beast when it was first uncovered in 1914 near Alcova, Wyoming. For one thing, scientists didn’t have much to go on since most of the specimen was destroyed in the late 1920s when ceiling pipes in the museum holding the specimen burst and flooded the facility. All that was left was one femur, plaster casts of the two most complete elongated tail spines, and a few photographs of the quarry and of the skeleton as it was displayed in the museum gallery.

While peer reviews were lacking at the turn of the last century, by the advent of the new century scholars showed a renewed interest in the bones. Ongoing work on stegosaurs by Peter M. Galton, professor emeritus at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut and Kenneth Carpenter, director and curator of paleontology at Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum, found them at odds with some of their peers. One scholar from England concluded that the original species designation was invalid, that it was not, in fact, a new species of Stegosaurus at all.

Galton and Carpenter recognized anomalies as well, namely longer spikes and a shorter tail and a creature that stood a full foot taller than its Stegosaurus relative. Their research led them to conclude that what they were seeing was much more than a species of Stegosaurus, it was actually a new genus altogether based on specimen studies, both real and cast, and analysis of archival photographs.

Their paper has now been published (Jan. 27) in the “Neuse Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Palaeontologie,” an international journal of geology and paleontology, based in Stuttgart, Germany.

“We’re presenting it and we’ll see how it holds up under the test of time,” Carpenter says. “Who knows, somebody may conclusively prove that it’s not valid, although it would be hard to do because of the long spikes.

Spikes that were up to three-feet in length, or about twice as long as the Stegosaurus. Its rather short tail, about 25 percent shorter than Stegosaurus, made it possible for the dinosaur to accommodate the extra-long tail spikes, he says.

“Besides the short tail, this bob-tailed stegosaur probably could not swing its tail as much as Stegosaurus based on what we know of the tail vertebrae,” he says. “So, having longer spikes makes sense as a way to compensate.”

This dinosaur is important, even though its genus line appears to be a dead-end, because it shows that the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period were far more diverse than scholars previously realized. Numbers of species and genera help fill in gaps and paint a more complete picture of what life was like 150 million years ago, he says.

This particular dinosaur has yet to be found in Utah. So far only Wyoming can lay claim to it, “but there is a chance that it could be found here someday,” Carpenter says. “It is possible that some of the partial skeletons referred to Stegosaurus might be re-identified as Alcovasaurus if we had the right parts.”

Parts like puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled and waiting to be named, because once named, they spring to life again through imagination, whether in a scholarly paper, on the pages of a child’s book, or on the silver screen.

Carpenter says the fact that a new species of Stegosaurus named in 1914, and only now being recognized as a novel dinosaur, is another example of finding new dinosaurs in old collections. He has been in on the naming of maybe 12 of these creatures in his 30-plus year career. He has not kept track.

“Once one research project is done, I move on to the next one,” he says. “I don’t think about it.” But he has welcomed the opportunity whenever it comes his way. He is currently trying to name a new species of armored dinosaur from material found north of Arches National Park. He has at least three new dinosaurs yet to be named that are currently in museum storage.

The realization that only one new genus of dinosaur is discovered every few years, places Carpenter and Galton in an elite group of scholars. Furthermore, these new finds are particularly significant when one considers that the number of dinosaur species from the Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock sequence, known as the Morrison Formation, only totals around 52.

What is most interesting to Carpenter is just how rare this particular find is. His museum houses a Stegosaurus stenops, probably the most common Stegosaur that is found with maybe 100 total individuals uncovered in the United States.

“I realize that sounds like a low number, but in paleontology circles, that is actually a very high number, because we’re only looking at a small portion of all the ones that ever existed,” he says. “So we now have another animal, the Alcovasaurus, which is increasing the diversity. So far it’s the only one of its kind that’s been found.”

And he got to help name it.

Tour Bus Rates

The museum offers tour bus rates! Contact Lloyd Logan by phone at (435) 613-5760 or by email at lloyd.logan@usu.edu for details. Include The Prehistoric Museum on your itinerary and your patrons will be delighted!

School Tours at The Prehistoric Museum

School tours are free and require two weeks advance notice to Lloyd Logan, 435-613-5760 or lloyd.logan@usu.edu. Kids of all ages love the museum, dinosaurs and a tour given by Lloyd! He is the best tour guide around.

Call or email for special tour bus rates!